Blast from the past: Jackie Chan's "City Hunter".

I took my 15-year-old daughter to her first anime' convention this weekend, and one of the films they showed in the otaku room was City Hunter, starring a young Jackie Chan. City Hunter was an animated cop cartoon, and the movie is a live-action version of that, but retaining much of the cartoon sensibility. This film doesn't have a lot of the prop-centered stunt work of Chan's later films, but it does have a LOT of live stunts, no greenscreen, and lots of close-in hand-to-hand action.

The plot, such as it is, is something like "Die Hard", only set on a cruise liner. The movie is utter, utter cheese, from beginning to end. But, I mean that in an ADMIRING way. Chan lets us know he's playing this for laughs the whole way, and you have to admire his intensity. There were laughs aplenty, and, appropriate for our viewing venue, an extended sort of "dream sequence" where Jackie and his opponents "become" the characters in a certain martial arts game that had some passing fame, back in the day.

There's also a little sexism and homophobia here and there, the film is after all a relic of it's age. If you can get past those, this might be a fun one to make up snacks and throw a viewing party for. If you love Godzilla movies, if you love video games, if you love low budget action movies, or if you're Scott Roberts, you will probably enjoy this throwback movie.

I'm only sorry that it took so long for me to come across this title. I enjoyed the screening at the convention so much, I bought a DVD off Amazon the next day to share with friends.

Nice! City Hunter sounds right up my alley. I just picked it up on Amazon Marketplace for $3.34 used. I like me some old school Jackie Chan! A few years ago I picked up "The Jackie Chan Collection", which came in a cheap tin box and had a few of his older, lesser-known movies in it: Fire Dragon, Eagle Shadow Fist, Fantasy Mission Force, and a couple others. It's pretty awesome, I think I got it for like $15. I mean, the movies are not of a high-quality, but they are good in a bad kind of way. I'm not a full-on Jackie Chan expert, but the guy is entertaining in a very unique way that I'm always open to checking out.

One of these days it might be fun to pick this or another movie we both own on DVD, watch it at the same time in our respective homes, and live-blog a few impressions or comments in the common space as the film unfolds. Not MST3k-like, so much as Siskel/Ebert-like.